Are Quakers repeating their Khmer Rouge mistake in China?

 Are Quakers repeating their Khmer Rouge mistake in China?

by Michael Rubin  | October 20, 2021 06:00 AM

Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime murdered upwards of one million Cambodians.

Across the globe, almost everyone reeled in horror. Not so the American Friends Service Committee, the official NGO of the Society of Friends, or, as they are better known, the Quakers. The AFSC defended Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, even as word emerged that the group had killed one million citizens.

John McAuliff, the AFSC's Indo-China division chief, called reports of Khmer Rouge mass murder an American attempt to discredit "the example of an alternative model of development." New England Regional Director Russell Johnson dismissed "bloodbath stories" as motivated by both American "anti-communism" and a desire to punish countries who resisted "exploitation by multinational corporations seeking raw materials, markets for surplus, and cheap labor." Simply put, the AFSC treated innocent Cambodians as pawns for its politically corrupted moral clarity and commitment to passivism.

Rather than learn from the episode, the AFSC ignores it, as do the many Quaker schools (one of which I attended for 14 years). Perhaps political shadows cloud the inner light. By refusing to acknowledge its leaders’ past support for Pol Pot’s mass slaughter, the AFSC now risks repeating its mistakes on a potentially even greater genocide.

That China now undertakes the greatest genocide of the 21st century against its Uyghur population is beyond dispute. Thousands of credible reports and a vast swath of satellite imagery testify to the concentration camps that intern millions of Uyghurs. President Xi Jinping’s regime forcibly sterilizes many Uyghur women and forces others to share beds with ethnic Han men, in effect subjecting themselves to state-mandated rape. The state separates children from their parents and seizes property. The AFSC’s response? Crickets.

Joyce Ajlouny, the AFSC’s general secretary since 2017, has not spoken about the Uyghur plight during her tenure. While the AFSC sponsors a letter-writing campaign to Guantanamo Bay prisoners, certainly an activity true to the AFSC’s original mandate, no such corollary exists to support Uyghur prisoners — even though China's concentration camps hold more than 50,000 times as many detainees as Guantanamo Bay. Likewise, active AFSC opposition to the Trump-era "Muslim ban " makes its silence on the largest Muslim genocide, at least since Genghis Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258, even more striking.

Part of the problem may be that the AFSC has invested heavily in its China programs and is loath to criticize a government whose support it needs. The AFSC also relies on Beijing’s good graces to continue its North Korea programming . Self-censorship in the face of grotesque violence, however, hardly upholds Quaker values or fulfills AFSC's call to "speak truth to power ." A recent report co-sponsored by the AFSC blithely dismissed fears that engagement as normal would legitimize the Uyghur crackdown. The report instead suggested that "expectations that China would evolve into a U.S.-style political system" were never realistic. This is a straw man argument. There is a huge difference between recognizing that concentration camps are bad and expecting Jeffersonian democracy.

The AFSC’s denial of the Cambodian genocide is a moral stain upon the group. Rather than repeat its mistake, it is crucial that Quakers, and all those who value the AFSC’s stated mission to advance peace and human rights, demand moral introspection from an organization that has gone dangerously askew. Principle should not be sacrificed for partisanship.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971 ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.